Twenty years after leaving Iraq on a one-way ticket, I returned to my country today, on May 27, 2016, not so much to visit the living as to visit the dead.

We, the people of Baghdad, used to refer to the north as a “resort”—it was our only tourist destination when travel was forbidden during the 1980s on account of the Iran-Iraq War. But this isn’t tourism today. We came to visit the mass graves, perhaps to bury our feelings, too, and to get rid of their weight upon our souls—or perhaps because they needed us, they needed us so much and yet we didn’t go! Or because we’re alive, and we can, quite simply, visit the dead.

But the one survivor I most wanted to see was Abdullah.

“Peace be upon you,” he said formally, smiling. I had expected him to be dressed in white Yazidi clothes, not a modern outfit. We had agreed to visit the temple of Lalish together because, as the sacred Yazidi texts say, “The earth wasn’t satisfied with its condition until Lalish was revealed; only then did the plants grow, and did the earth become beautiful.”

I asked him if he was busy that day with a rescue operation. He said that he was.

“May I come with you?” I asked.

“Are you sure you want to do that? You have a US passport. It would be risky.”

“I’d like to witness the process firsthand.”

“Ok, but memorize my phone number, in case you need to be rescued.”

I laughed and said, “Okay, I’m ready.”

“You actually believed me? Not today. Besides, I wouldn’t take you with me to Syria—let’s go to Lalish instead.”

We drove almost forty miles, along winding roads to the east of Dohuk, toward Sheikhan. The temple looked small from the outside, but as soon as we entered, it opened up to infinity. We walked in barefoot like the others did, because “there should be no barrier between the foot of the entrant and the temple’s floor.” Our feet touched stones that were over four thousand years old; another world opened up right before our eyes, in the depths of the mountain, somewhere between myth and reality. The narrow pass, surrounded by three mountains, gradually opened wider, revealing all that it had, like the generosity of its people, but sometimes it also closed in on itself, like the Yazidi religion.